The Stooges

1969

20

The Stooges’ debut album practically dared listeners not to flee in the other direction, whether from disgust or boredom. The album’s second song finds Iggy Pop—a knot of pure sinew given to stripping shirtless, smearing himself in peanut butter, and surfing across the crowd—drawling a bizarrely submissive love song about curling up like Fido. Song three, “We Will Fall,” is a 10-minute, drum-free dirge suggestive of Hare Krishnas on heavy Quaaludes. Even the album’s crackerjack opener, the nihilist “1969,” begins with four bars of plodding wah-wah and quarter-note snares, like a turgid fake-out to scare off the squares.

But anyone who stuck around quickly discovered the pleasures of the Stooges’ gut-punch approach. The teenage ennui of “1969” still sounds as timely as ever; “Real Cool Time” amounts to a defiant cry of lunkheaded joy. And “I Wanna Be Your Dog” summons one of the most sinister riffs in rock’n’roll. The album is unabashedly savage, fuzzy as a moldy peach, subtle as a hangover. Nevertheless, John Cale’s production on the album harnesses just enough studio magic to make them sound positively otherworldly, from the swollen low end, dark as a bruise, to the blown-out sonics of Ron Asheton’s guitar solos. Throughout, in unexpected pockets of silence, handclaps pop like fireworks. What could be more American than that? –Philip Sherburne

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Dusty in Memphis

1969

19

“I wish I’d been born coloured,” British belter Dusty Springfield once told an interviewer. “When it comes to singing and feeling, I just want to be one of them and not me. Then again, I see how some of them are treated and I thank God I’m white.” Springfield walked a racially-charged line with her music, but it wasn’t always this way. After scoring tame pop hits early on, she signed to Atlantic Records, then the heart of soul music, and set about making the kind of music she’d long favored. Recorded at Memphis’ famed American Sound Studio using musicians favored by Aretha Franklin, Dusty in Memphis was marked by the pressure Springfield felt following in the Queen of Soul’s footsteps. Not only was Springfield inspired to re-record the bulk of her vocals in New York, but her biggest hit—the sexual coming-of-age memento “Son of a Preacher Man”—was originally rejected by Franklin (who later covered it).

Springfield had a dreamier approach to cinematic soul, one that allowed her to extol the benefits of morning sex and lament the loneliness of lurid affairs while still appealing to an easy-listening crowd. Though she may have doubted her ability to compete with the emotional depths plumbed by her black peers, what she created in their model was a perspective all her own. –Jillian Mapes

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Let It Bleed

1969

18

Popular thinking has it that the 1960s ended with Altamont, the Manson killings, or the Beatles’ split. But Let It Bleed, the Rolling Stones’ eighth album released in Britain, could also make a strong claim to killing the decade’s dream. Released at the end of 1969, Let It Bleed brilliantly captures the ’60s fantasy turned dark, more blood in the streets than flowers in the hair.

A feeling of imminent doom hangs over the record in its apocalyptic lyrics of war, rape, and murder, in its edgy blues riffs, and in Mick Jagger’s sneering, lascivious vocals. It can be felt in the murderous, hard Chicago blues of “Midnight Rambler,” in the anguished cry for help of “Gimme Shelter,” and in the strutting filth of “Monkey Man,” which celebrates depravity while parodying the band’s popular image. This desperation was expressed by the Stones at their very musical peak, when they were loose enough to let a song like “Let It Bleed” swing and hadn’t slid into the occasional sloppiness of their 1970s recordings. Let It Bleed may not be the most original album of the ’60s, with African-American influences hanging heavily over its nine songs, but it is one of the most brilliantly atmospheric, endearingly brutal, and downright menacing albums of the decade. –Ben Cardew

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The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady

1963

17

Charles Mingus was one of the 20th century’s great composers and improvisers—traits distilled nowhere so clearly as on this 40-minute extended composition from 1963, a work for 10 players that often sounds more explosive than any progressive big-band or orchestral opus. Down-home blues, Ellington swing, and classical textures are all here, though no single style is able to fully capture this unpredictable but ultimately joyful music.

The opening track builds to a state of fevered wailing, after starting from a solo drum pattern devised by Mingus to suggest three different tempos. "Track B-Duet and Solo Dancers" offers sweet balladry, before quickening into a passage of locomotive crunch. In any given moment, the piece is always holding multiple potential moods in reserve. These bustling ideas seem to stand in for Mingus’ own psyche—a view that the composer all but endorsed by inviting his personal psychologist to contribute liner notes for the album. On this elaborate project, even the clinical asides from a doctor prove lyrical: “His music is a call for acceptance, respect, love, understanding, fellowship, freedom—a plea to change the evil in man and to end hatred.” –Seth Colter Walls

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Abbey Road

1969

16

Everyone knows now that the Beatles hated each other by the end. But Abbey Road, the final album they recorded, has become a fantasy of togetherness that both the world and the band itself needed to indulge. After the acrimony spurred by Let It Be’s jam-session approach, Paul McCartney and producer George Martin called for one more record featuring the collaboration and cohesion of the band’s early days. But they only got halfway there. The first side featured standalone songs that represented their individual visions, including George Harrison’s most stunning compositions with the Beatles (“Something,” “Here Comes the Sun”), and flashes of rawness from the two main songwriters (“Oh! Darling,” where McCartney pushes his voice to its limit, and “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” in which John Lennon predates heavy-metal transcendence).

Side two, on the other hand, fed into the idea that the Beatles could still work together in the name of ambitious art. Though its songs were written separately and stitched together by McCartney and Martin, the run from “Because” to “The End” has a beauty that exceeds the value of any given part. “Because” wouldn’t be a great song if John, Paul, and George hadn’t nailed the eerie three-part harmony, just as “The End” wouldn’t hit nearly as hard without Ringo’s only on-record drum solo and those dueling guitars. McCartney knew what was coming and turned a sentimental eye towards closure, ultimately offering one of the most quoted lines about love in pop’s history (“And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make”). Now that is how you end a band. –Jillian Mapes

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Out to Lunch!

1964

15

When Eric Dolphy recorded Out to Lunch!, the saxophonist/flautist/clarinetist assembled a group that lacked a piano as its central, chordal engine. He replaced it with an instrument that was more crystalline, as well as depthless: a vibraphone, here played by Bobby Hutcherson. No one player solos through the space where a piano should be so much as they talk sensitively and intuitively to each other inside of it, which makes even the most free and explosive phrases on the album blend into a dynamic, harmonious conversation. Like a good dialogue, it can degenerate into anomie or brief parentheses of silence, but just as often, the different voices almost symphonically align to express an idea that they couldn’t have discovered separately. As Dolphy was quoted as saying on the original liner notes for the album, “Everyone’s a leader in this session.” –Brad Nelson

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Highway 61 Revisited

1965

14

Along U.S. Route 61, blues music was born and Bessie Smith died. The highway was a northbound escape route for those seeking to leave the poverty of the Mississippi Delta, and a southbound escape route for James Earl Ray after he assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr. It also connected a young Jewish man from his home in Minnesota to the Southern music he’d adopt and find new clarity in.

Highway 61 Revisited documents an era’s rising tide of anger and disassociation—not to mention Dylan’s own. In 1965, having outgrown his acoustic guitar and the Greenwich Village scene, he rewired the meaning of folk music, plugging in and writing about truths and untruths, the clowns of state, the circus of relativism, and the plight of the worker, all with a comic cynicism and romantic yearning. The studio sessions were chaotic and musically undefined; his lyrics went on for pages; a slide whistle factored in prominently. But out of this tangle of blues and country, he hit upon the countercultural chasm between the youth of the ’60s and elder generations, concluding with a smirk: “Because something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is.”

Dylan created this text as a map of America, its history rooted in oppression, filtered through the lupine howl of a 24-year-old bohemian nipping at the heels of Rimbaud and Verlaine. But its wisdom remains perplexing: How could Ma Rainey and Beethoven both fit into a two-chord song that moves like a locomotive on fire? How do Paul Griffin’s honky-tonk piano parts and Dylan's limerick-level verses stay this potent? Dylan’s surreal travelogues reflect his uncertain world, and his most powerful moment on the album is a confession of what he doesn’t know: “How does it feel?” he asks. “How does it feel?” He smirks again, and says you might find whatever you’re looking for down on Highway 61, the central nerve that separates and unites America. –Jeremy D. Larson

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Electric Ladyland

1968

13

Jimi Hendrix as guitarist is legend enough. A southpaw innovator who thought in noise and texture as much as notes and chords, he defined one of the most important aspects of psychedelic rock by splitting the difference between Chicago blues and free jazz. Electric Ladyland was the point when it became clear why he was making all that transcendent racket. It offered virtuosity in the service of worldbuilding—the old ways of hooky, three-minute rhythm & blues finding renewed purpose in this brave new Aquarian frontier.

Hendrix was a master of both the boundless potential and the immediate simplicity of rock, as he proves on this double LP, the third blueprint-redrawing album he released with bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell in a year and a half. In Ladyland, he puts the stompy kazoo funk of “Crosstown Traffic” and his supercharged cover of Earl King’s “Come On” in the same universe as the supernatural ritual of “Voodoo Chile” and the underwater, post-apocalypse utopian vision of “1983… (A Merman I Should Turn to Be).” All these sides can be heard in a four-minute microcosm, too: Hendrix repossesses “All Along the Watchtower” so thoroughly, reshaping a desolate folk-rock lament into a harrowing escape plan, that Bob Dylan himself couldn’t hear his song afterwards without Jimi’s transformations haunting him. –Nate Patrin

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The Velvet Underground

1969

12

After the hedonistic moments of their first album gave way to the hard-rock hallucinations of White Light/White Heat, the Velvet Underground took an unexpected turn for the spiritual. Lou Reed once grasped for transcendence on “Heroin,” but the masochists and dope fiends that had colored the band’s previous releases largely receded into the background on their self-titled third album.

In their place was introspection, empathy, and even sweetness. Tracks as rollicking as “Beginning to See the Light” and as whispery as “Jesus” sound like prayers for salvation. For an account of adultery, “Pale Blue Eyes” is disarmingly zen, with Reed ceding his claim on a married soulmate over watery strumming and distant shakes of tambourine. You don’t have to know that the folksy lullaby “Candy Says” was a portrait of transgender Warhol superstar Candy Darling for its characterization of the human body as a prison to resonate. The band kept their underworld mystique alive on “The Murder Mystery,” a nine-minute collage of lurid narratives that later appeared as a poem in The Paris Review. That the track doesn't sound jarring amid all that sincerity only confirms that grit was always VU’s schtick, not their true subject. –Judy Berman

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Songs of Leonard Cohen

1967

11

A 33-year-old Leonard Cohen arrived to the folk scene a stranger in a strange land, with the aura of someone much older. He beheld you from the cover of his debut album with doe eyes and a grim mouth, in a black-and-white photo that seemed to belong to the 1940s more than the 1960s. His music was similarly out-of-time, with unforgettable lyrics that blew in like a breeze from some remote isle, perfumed with odd scents—tea, oranges. He played guitar gently and with great precision, the same way that he sang. He might have been friends with Lou Reed and Bob Dylan, but he didn’t strum or holler, and Songs of Leonard Cohen existed in a world without rock’n’roll.

Cohen’s path to the recording studio was wayward and ambling, animated by an inner melody that only he seemed to hear. He began his career as a published writer, typing out love poems about the ovens of Auschwitz and serenely filthy novels about sex and drugs. He carried all of this with him to the studio, and Songs of Leonard Cohen feels like the continuation of a larger story. There are characters in these songs, people with names that Cohen clearly knows intimately and expects you to know as well. Now that Cohen has passed, his discography sits like a holy stone city, and this record is the church at the city’s center: You can walk around it, listen to the echoes, put your hands on the smooth stones. You can read its address by the moon. –Jayson Greene

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I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You

1967

10

The Queen of Soul’s reign began here. Groomed as a jazz-pop singer by Columbia, Aretha Franklin jumped to the R&B powerhouse Atlantic for her 11th album, I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You. The label’s big idea was to “let Aretha be Aretha.” For the Memphis-born daughter of a Detroit preacher man, a 24-year-old mother of three who was trapped in a troubled marriage, that meant singing about adult emotional complexities with world-weary wisdom and barrel-chested expressiveness, accompanied by her own gospel piano chords, a bottom-heavy Muscle Shoals rhythm section, and punchy horns. It also meant hits, actual hits.

Franklin’s biggest solo smash is still this album’s reinvention of Otis Redding’s “Respect” as a dancefloor-ready call to consciousness, spelled out and spiced up with sock-it-to-me backing vocals by her sisters (“Ree,” as in “ree-ree-ree-ree-respect,” was their nickname for Aretha). The bluesy title track enacts a toxic codependency; the country-molasses waltz “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man” could keep any couple together. Franklin showed her songwriting strengths, too, especially on the candidly lustful “Dr. Feelgood.” But she was more apt to lay claim on songs made famous by male R&B greats—not only Redding but also Ray Charles and, twice, her hero Sam Cooke, whose civil rights anthem “A Change Is Gonna Come” she reimagines no less boldly than “Respect,” proclaiming, “My change is gonna come.” –Marc Hogan

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In a Silent Way

1969

9

In 1969, Miles Davis was in search of a new sound, and In a Silent Way is the soundtrack to that search. At 42, he had already reinvented jazz a few times, and with the genre on the cusp of being completely eclipsed by rock and pop, he pivoted once again, taken with the psychedelic electrics of Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone. But this album isn’t a trend hop as much as it’s a soothsaying outlier—it hinted at what would become known as jazz fusion in the ’70s, but it also wafted into Tortoise’s post-rock of the ’90s and Radiohead’s most outré experiments of the 21st century. Even now, it still stands out of time, in limbo, floating.

“Why don’t you play it like you don’t know how to play the guitar?” That’s the advice Miles gave to his guitarist, John McLaughlin, while recording the record’s title track. On the surface, the suggestion is nonsensical. In practice, it’s a skeleton key opening doors to sounds unheard. So as McLaughlin’s clean notes begin to slowly unwind at the start of the song, electric pianos and organ quietly dot the background, like errant raindrops after a sunshower, and then Miles’ rasping horn begins its own quest out of the darkness. Everything has to earn its intrusion into the silent void. Consider how Davis mainstay Tony Williams, one of jazz’s great drummers, rides his hi-hat—and only his hi-hat—throughout the entire first half of the record before switching to an unfussy, rim-click metronome on the second side. This is music made by a bunch of geniuses who are doing everything they can to not sound like a bunch of geniuses. Nevertheless, genius ensues. –Ryan Dombal

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Revolver

1966

8

Both a landmark and a pivot, Revolver bursts with the creativity of four men in their 20s discovering Indian scales, tape loops, psychedelics, baroque string arrangements, surreal kid-folk, fuzz pedals, and themselves. Already possessing the world’s ear following several years of increasingly ranging hits, Revolver continued the quartet’s transfiguration from lovable moptops to lovable visionaries, reinventing rock with an effortlessness akin to magic. The album signaled the dawn of a stoned and eclectic pop age, from the cheeky garage snarl of George Harrison’s “Taxman” to the radiophonic swirl of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” John Lennon and producer George Martin’s first psychedelic opus. Even a half-century after being absorbed into rock’s lingua franca, Revolver not only sounds fresh but fun, perfectly bottling the exuberant rush of youth while pioneering new songwriting modes and production tricks with nearly every verse, chorus, and middle eight. –Jesse Jarnow

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Live at the Apollo

1963

7

When James Brown pitched the idea of a live LP to King Records founder Syd Nathan, he was famously rebuffed. So Brown bankrolled Live at the Apollo himself, providing coffee to those freezing in line outside the legendary Harlem venue where, hours later, he would make the best live album of all time.

Live at the Apollo documents a disciplined, exhaustively road-tested touring unit and a hungry 29-year-old frontman who’d gone nine singles between hits. From emcee Fats Gonder’s nickname-filled introduction to the airtight rhythm workouts, from the nearly 11-minute exaltation of “Lost Someone” to the breakneck medley bookended by “Please, Please, Please,” the James Brown Revue teased, tested, and defied the clock this evening. But just as essential were the fans on this Wednesday night in fall 1962, screaming and begging as the Cuban Missile Crisis threatened global devastation outside. Soon enough, listeners worldwide would share the passion that Brown’s Apollo audience had for him. –Marc Hogan

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Blonde on Blonde

1966

6

Bob Dylan put out seven albums in his first four years on Columbia, a creative arc perhaps best represented by a hot-air balloon going straight up into the stratosphere. In this formulation, Blonde on Blonde—lucky No. 7, released when Dylan was hungry and it was his world—is the point where his music reaches the edges of space, the frightening limit beyond which it could go no further. This is the album with the most intricate melodies, the harshest harmonica bleats, the most tangled imagery; it subtweets John Lennon, tells you where to hang your binoculars, and correctly notes that to live outside the law, you have to be honest. It’s the one with Dylan’s funniest jokes but it’s also filled with crushing heartbreak, and it’s the one with the best drumming and the fattest organ sound.

Dylan never made another record like it. Blonde on Blonde is a sprawling and messy double-album, a record that opens with an adolescent joke about weed and closes with an epic, surreal, and deeply moving side-long meditation on love. Improbably, despite its length and speed-addled excess and rhymes that are approximately 20 percent duds, it all hangs together, not unlike a mattress balancing on a bottle of wine. About two months after its release, Dylan may or may not have taken a motorcycle ride that ended in a crash, and the balloon that shot skyward would drop a few thousand feet. The view was still great, but the air wasn’t quite so thin, and the mercury sound wasn’t quite so wild. –Mark Richardson

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Wild Is the Wind

1966

5

On the morning of September 15, 1963, a bomb planted by members of the Ku Klux Klan went off underneath the stairs of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young black girls. Like many, Nina Simone was galvanized by the tragedy. After making her name with memorable takes on love songs and showtunes, she felt a new responsibility to help the black community with her art. The next year, rage fueled “Mississippi Goddam,” her first musical reaction to such injustices; “Four Women,” the lone song she wrote on Wild Is the Wind, is more subdued but just as cutting. She details the stereotypical roles available for black women in civil rights-era America—the old auntie, the biracial outcast, the prostitute, the revolutionary—embedding histories of slavery, colorism, and oppression into music sparse enough to soundtrack a supper club soiree. Without those four girls in Birmingham, “Four Women” may have never come to be. The song would help set her creative course as she became increasingly involved in the movements around her.

The rest of Wild Is the Wind zeroes in on a more romantic brand of heartbreak. In 1966, Simone was in the middle of her tumultuous relationship with husband and manager Andrew Stroud, who often tried to steer her away from cultural commentary in favor of less heavy—and, potentially, more commercial—material. But even when she’s playing the more traditional balladeer on “Lilac Wine” or the album’s title track, Simone’s tremulous voice conjures world-churning drama out of every curling phrase. In turn, each song adds a haunting humanity to her sketches of black womanhood. –Ryan Dombal

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The Beatles

1968

4

With Sgt. Pepper’s, the Beatles invented the rock album: What it might sound like, what sort of artwork might accompany it, how it might look displayed on the shelf. It was a wildly audacious gambit for a group of kids, and just 18 months later, with The Beatles, they shattered their own idea completely, with an object so heavy and unyielding the shelf collapsed.

The idea of a smartly sequenced, tightly stitched suite of songs goes out the window: What we hear on the White Album, as it’s now universally called, is an assembly line of products with no operator. You can stare at the tantalizingly blank sleeve until you go snow-blind, trying to decode it. Nothing about it makes any kind of sense, and you will never meet a living soul who insists all the songs on it are worth keeping, nor will you find two people who agree on which songs to cut. The only real story binding its four sides occurs offstage, in the Beatles’ soap opera of creative differences; in band mythology, this was the moment the ship sailed irreversibly towards the iceberg, with three squabbling creative forces bent on wresting the wheel from one another. But cocooned inside the music, we don’t hear the bickering.

As a result, the White Album is entirely what you make of it. The wild tonal variants, the hairpin turns from mocking and specious (“Glass Onion,” “Back in the U.S.S.R.”) to nakedly emotional (“Blackbird,” “Julia,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”) to scabrous and ugly (“Yer Blues,” “Helter Skelter”)—we draw our own maps. Generations of songwriters have taken one or more of its dead-end roads and hacked a new subgenre out of the brush, from Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk to the Clash’s London Calling to Elliott Smith’s XO. To record your White Album is to make something that tugs and bursts at its own seams. To listen to your White Album is to never reach the same set of conclusions. –Jayson Greene

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A Love Supreme

1965

3

John Coltrane’s classic quartet—featuring pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones—hit a pinnacle of their expressive potential together in the recording session that took place on December 9, 1964. Given all that it contains, the album put to tape on that day can seem paradoxically compact: It’s not quite 33 minutes long, so how is it possible for there to be so much space for each soloist to shine? Enough time for Coltrane, as composer, to make the spiritual stakes of this four-movement suite so dramatically clear?

A Love Supreme’s unusual power remains as mysterious as its pleasures are durable. There are an impressive number of Coltranes that we can hear. His solos are full of passages that show off his sturdy tone as well as his fluid melodic variations, but, in a surprise move, he also sings the album’s title during the opening “Acknowledgement.” Occasionally, he ventures high-register notes on his tenor sax that seem to gasp with airy vulnerability. Jimmy Garrison’s bass creates a mood of risk as well as grace as he steadily navigates a series of fresh chords at the end of “Pursuance.” Pianist McCoy Tyner and drummer Elvin Jones foster breakneck swing or deep reflection, given the needs of the moment.

In A Love Supreme’s liner notes, Coltrane describes the album as a “humble offering to HIM.” But this is no easygoing tribute; personal and social struggle informs it throughout. As Ashley Kahn observes in a recent reissue set essay, Coltrane’s drafted score for A Love Supreme references the closing chord of “Alabama,” his earlier tribute to the victims of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. A Love Supreme carries a similarly complex spirit, working at a celebration of life while also confronting the reality of terror. To make good on the effort, the album strikes an interfaith posture: Some of its blues cries come from the black church, and Coltrane’s chanted vocals suggest Eastern spiritual traditions. Just as the album demands much of its composer and his fellow players, it also encourages us to enlarge our own capacities. –Seth Colter Walls

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Pet Sounds

1966

2

Before Pet Sounds, rock existed in the declarative, the shouting of the succinct: The Beatles wanted to hold this, the Stones couldn’t get that, the Kinks wanted you then. Even the Beach Boys were content to party there, ankles in the surf, harmonizing salt-flecked snapshots of the Southern California idyll. But on the group’s 11th album, Brian Wilson turned his attention inward, to ask questions without clear answers—and, along the way, invented the modern pop auteur.

Pet Sounds is an album of grand, immediate pleasures: rhapsodic falsettos, deep melodies elated by strings and brass, blips of bike horns and barking dogs. But it also bows to a central humility—the unknowability of love—and in doing so, reaches grace. To other bands, affairs were prizes won and lost, the products of obvious motives and crisp faults. But here, Wilson writes in the wistful, patient meditations of the perennial outsider; he has no explanations on how romance endures, or why it leaves, or where innocence is lost. Whether marveling over his wife’s fidelity in “You Still Believe in Me,” or bidding goodbye to his heart’s ideal on “Caroline, No,” he is wide-eyed. In “God Only Knows,” the most beautiful pop song of the ’60s, Brian and lyricist Tony Asher direct cherubic vocalist Carl Wilson to be helpless with awe, alighting on a willfully unromantic suggestion—that love is a sustained choice, after it’s a lightning bolt—inside a melody so sublime it becomes a sonnet. None of this is delivered in absolutes; Wilson’s most confident resolution on the album is that he doesn’t fit in, that he “just wasn’t made for these times.”

He was ahead of them, while channeling centuries before. On Pet Sounds, Wilson introduces many tropes now central to pop music: the lone savant who conducts the band and the recording studio; the pensive observer, too gentle for this world; and the song cycle, a succession of tracks with entwined emotional and musical motifs. It’s no accident these are contemporary updates on classical composers, like Wilson’s beloved Gershwin and Beethoven. Here, as producer and arranger, he coaxes in elements of their symphonies—plus exotica, baroque, calypso, and a funhouse of eccentric instruments—electronically stacking it all into a roiling wave of sound, topped with the most spiritual and psychedelic harmonies the Beach Boys would ever swoon. Today, Wilson continues to speak to the romantic in every listener, in the radiant spaces between what is known. –Stacey Anderson

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The Velvet Underground & Nico

1967

1

The dream of the underground as an autonomous zone takes root here: a sense of style that would pave the way for glam rock; a sense of nihilism that would bulldoze a clear path for punk; an uncompromisingly avant-garde sound that would lead to post-punk and beyond. There was their subject matter, decadent and depraved: whips and furs, back-alley blowjobs, tragic heroines, and also heroin—lots of heroin. The hippie phenomenon was a populist movement, as relatable to teenagers as bubble-gum pop had been a few years prior, and the Velvets were anything but. They invented a whole new kind of cool, their sound raw and shambolic: “Femme Fatale,” despite its glamorous premise, sounds like it was recorded in a broom closet. Lou Reed’s voice is high and nasal, and Nico—a fashion model and actor from Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and Warhol’s Chelsea Girls—sounds about as lively as an IV drip. The record was grotty and lo-fi, the sound of a reel-to-reel tape retreating into a turtle shell. And yet they had noise, much from their avant-gardist John Cale, a classically trained violist who turned his education into droning, seesawing, nails-on-a-chalkboard frequencies. When they performed, incongruously, at a formal dinner for the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry in 1966, one shrink called them “a short-lived torture of cacophony.”

Today, it’s easy to see The Velvet Underground & Nico as a solipsistic record, given all the social and political problems of the era that it ignores; the Velvets weren’t so much turning on and dropping out as digging in and shooting up. If the contemporary underground begins here then so too, perhaps, does its occasionally blinkered perspective. Art for art’s sake can be a hell of a drug. But for all of their danger and debasement, there was also something cozy about the Velvet Underground. “Sunday Morning” is a song about taking stock of the “wasted years,” yet it’s as gentle as a lullaby. “Heroin,” despite Reed’s bleak decision to “nullify my life,” turns two chords and a motorik beat into a burbling sunrise pulse that feels like rock’n’roll heaven. Far from “closing in on death,” the Velvet Underground were zeroing in on the sound of the future. –Philip Sherburne